Photo credit: Chester Higgins, Jr./New York TimesMaya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, MO in 1928. Angelou is a cultural icon that is renowned for her revolutionary writing and work in the civil rights movement. Her second memoir, Gather Together in My Name, details her experiences as a sex worker and madam in her early adulthood. While sex work was only one of Angelou’s many professions, the experience was important enough for her to dedicate space to it in her writing. She did this purposefully, to demonstrate that humans are messy, imperfect, and multi-faceted. We make personal choices every day to survive, to get ahead, to do the “right” thing, and these choices, particularly those that have to do with our own bodies, are ours to make.